Our team of STEM entrepreneurs this week won The Next Tech Girl Superhero competition with the Anigram Trakka app. Loredana Leonard of Year 7 explains the competition and the winning app:
The Search For The Next Tech Girl Superhero is a competition organised by The Tech Girls Movement. It is a not-for-profit organisation that promotes positive female use of technology and advocates technology career options for girls.
This competition required us to ideate a solution to a problem in the form of an app. The app had to be fully functional and without any bugs. The interface must be intuitive and easily navigated through to produce the best results. It also required an entrepreneurial business plan that is used to document all research and progression in the project. A pitch video and demo video were also necessary components. These were to give a snapshot of the purpose of your app and how it works. These all had to be completed in the space of 12 weeks.
Our group, SSC Coders, based our app on the declining numbers in the koala population, and the current issues encountered by many researchers of an inaccurate count.
Our app is named Anigram Trakka and it is a source of collective data to locate primarily koalas. The app is an attempt to connect bushwalkers/tourists/Rangers or anyone with an interest in koalas with the researcher so the whereabouts of the animal is known by both parties. Essentially, it utilises the citizen science opportunities in any one given area to provide the researchers with the position of many koalas.
The app has been programmed so that if you see a koala in the wild, you can take a picture, post it with the information of time, date and location. This allows those who need the information to locate the koala, should they wish to tag it. It will be a great opportunity to find koalas in the wild and potentially be used to track any Australian animals.
Ms Sukkar our coach, alongside our mentor Daniella Di Santo, guided us through this process, constantly giving us feedback to produce the best results we could. Our research assistant Ms Rugiero assisted us in establishing contacts with professionals in the field such as Dr Kellie Leigh – Executive Director at Science for Wildlife and University of Sydney Researcher, Gary Fry – Conservation Officer, Taronga Wildlife Conservation Society Australia and WIRES the Wildlife Information Rescue & Education Service. We are grateful for their input and feedback.
